


Intentional Incursion

by Chimaera-Writes (ChimaeraKitten)



Category: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Genre: Elements of the Warhammer 40k worldbuilding, Gen, Humor, Lovecraftian Horror!ART AU, Mild Horror, No editing we die like mne, Telepathy, eldritch monstrosity, mild implied suicidal ideation, of the 'if I become a zombie please shoot me' variety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 05:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30134397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChimaeraKitten/pseuds/Chimaera-Writes
Summary: The first thing they taught every experimental vessel captain was the reasons why they should never, ever use the experimental parts of the ships unless they absolutely had to do so. Seth knew exactly why that was. The list of reasons that the technology should have only been used as a last resort was a mile long.But the problem with a last-resort option was that sometimes you really did reach your last resort.ORSeth and Iris meet ART for the first time.
Relationships: Asshole Research Transport & Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Seth & Iris (Murderbot Diaries)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 25





	Intentional Incursion

**Author's Note:**

> So here at last is the literal lovecraftian horror!ART AU I mentioned in the discord...a week ago? near the beginning of the angst channel, though I think this is rather (a lot) more wholesome (despite the...lovecraftian horror) than the later stuff in that channel.
> 
> Let me know if the glitch text is intrusive or a problem with anyone's software! It's just boxes to give the impression of an unknown element there, it doesn't need to be legible, but I don't want it to bleed into other lines and make them hard to read.

Iris wasn’t supposed to be there.

The university had been conducting covert research into warp-jump technology for decades, picking up where unscrupulous corporations left off when the loss of ships started cutting into profits. And even after decades of careful research, the tech was still considered highly dangerous, for unmanned experiments or last-resort emergency situations only. Seth had read the reports salvaged from the corporate ships—the horrors of tech failure in warp-jumps went far beyond infinite wormhole trips or alien remnant contamination. He _knew_ why the rules were in place and had vowed to make sure his daughter stayed far, _far_ away from warp-jump testing.

He just couldn’t plan for the emergencies.

The _Perihelion_ was one of the newest experimental ships—capable of both basic wormhole travel and warp-jumps, with the special shielding in its hull and secure areas developed out of the strange material left behind in the salvageable remnants of earlier tests. The theory went that the strange matter of the warp dimension would be better at shielding the effects of that dimension. The theory was sound, too—Seth had read the papers, the preliminary tests all bore out the data. It wouldn’t defend a human crew against what the researchers were calling “intentional incursion” (a euphemism hiding a nightmare) but so far the technology had worked perfectly shielding humans from the ambient effects of the warp dimension.

It was good work—a major step forward into making the tech applicable, but the “intentional incursion” problem was still enough for Seth to swear to himself to never use the _Perihelion’s_ warp-jump capabilities with children aboard.

Or ever, if he could help it.

But the nature of their work meant everyone had to break oaths eventually, and Seth found the breaking point of his when they were fleeing two corporate gunships on what was supposed to be a safe, routine research (and minor intel theft) trip.

They’d taken damage to the weapon’s system, and the bot pilot couldn’t compensate. The disabled weapons system of the larger gunship—a victory they’d fought dearly for—was going to be back online at any moment, and it probably wouldn’t even be that long before the second ship realized what they were doing to fool its scans and targeting lock. It would take far longer than that to reach the wormhole—there was no way they’d evade a hit long enough to outrun the corporates and escape. There was only one way out.

He made the call.

On the feed with the rest of the crew, he told everyone to get to one of the shielded areas and prepare for full warp-jump procedures. This was going to be a long jump—they had to get all the way home in one go, or they’d likely be trapped in corporate space since warp-jumps were known to disable the wormhole drive, and the only thing more dangerous than a ling warp-jump were multiple successive warp-jumps.

Martyn, he told to grab Iris and come to the bridge—the extra shielding protecting the bot pilot would be the best chance they’d have. The best chance she’d have.

He got off the feed and instructed the bot-pilot to start warp-jump procedures. With any luck, the corporate ships wouldn’t recognize the energy signature and would back off. That would be best for their crews anyway—warp-jumping often left a blast of ambient warp-noise escape the other dimension, and the unshielded corporate crews would be vulnerable.

Martyn arrived with Iris and started strapping her into a seat. She was still young enough to believe him when he reassured her that the blindfold and headphones were part of a fun game they were about to play, but Seth (when he had the focus to spare from double-and-triple-checking the bot pilot’s calculations) could see his hands shaking.

Both of them relaxed slightly when the headphones and blindfold went on without Iris making a fuss. It still wouldn’t protect her if something tried to get into her head directly. (Or, a horrible part of Seth’s mind whispered, if something got to him and Martyn and the rest of the—no. No, he had to hope that the shielding would prevent that outcome, the images of bloody massacres where entire crews tore each other apart with their bare hands were etched behind his eyelids.) But she’d be safe from ambient effects slipping past the shielding or an intentional incursion that didn’t go after her directly.

Martyn strapped himself in, then got on the feed to confirm the rest of the crew were prepped and secure. He locked eyes with Seth as he finished his checks. Seth put on a confident face he knew Martyn would see right through and told the bot pilot to initiate countdown.

“I love you,” Martyn said, putting on his blindfold.

“I love you too,” Seth said, just before the headphones went on over his husband’s ears. He focused back on the bot pilot’s information as the countdown echoed over the feed. Good, the corporate ships _had_ backed off. That lessened the weight of guilt on his chest, that he wasn’t about to condemn a bunch of indentured laborers to a fate worse than death.

The countdown hit zero.

The first few seconds of a warp-jump were a lot like wormhole travel: not all that different from regular space. A window would show the difference, but there was a reason the _Perihelion_ didn’t have windows on the bridge. Then the effects started to appear. First there was a low hum, which terrified Seth even though he knew it wasn’t even the direct ambient noise of the warp, just the diffusion of it through the hull, and perfectly harmless. Next, the slight visual noise at the very edges of his field of vision appeared, colors mismatching like a bad comm connection. Harmless again. Then a similar effect mate an appearance, except this time it was centered on people and the more delicate machine components. _That_ was slightly less harmless, as it was the warp directly leaking through the shielding, and Seth knew to avoid focusing on it as much as possible. That made it a little harder to track what the bot pilot was telling him via the display surfaces, but he managed.

That should have been the last of the major noticeable effects (though the ship’s sensors would record minor temperature and pressure variations inside the hull, which would grow in magnitude the longer they were in the warp dimension) and Seth’s job should have been to just ignore it while it slowly increased in severity until they came out of the warp and he convinced his relieved husband and confused daughter that they shouldn’t get on another spaceship until Iris was thirty _at least_ and maybe not even then.

It should have played out like that, but it didn’t.

The first indication was the bulkhead directly behind Iris’s seat. Seth looked up from monitoring the warp timer (not even half an hour, they just had to manage half an hour) to check on his daughter and noticed a slight discoloration. He thought he was imagining it at first, or that it was the same sort of visual effect he was seeing on just about every object now, but the more he looked at it out of the corner of his eye, the more obvious it became.

Gun to his head, he couldn’t describe it accurately, but in his report later he put it down as ‘somewhere between the glitched-out look of a corrupted image file and the changing amorphous flesh of an animal sliced in half.’ It was nothing like the slight un-synching of the leaking ambient effect.

_Intentional incursion,_ Seth thought.

His first instinct was to snatch Iris away from the…whatever it was, but fortunately he had better impulse control than that.

From everything he’d read about intentional incursion, it was like mold on bread—it might be visible in only one spot, but by the time you saw it, it was everywhere.

Everywhere.

Trying and failing to push down his panic, Seth triggered the bot pilot’s diagnostics. The incursion might not be catastrophic if the bot’s nav was still working.

The bot spat out its diagnostic results. Oh no, oh please, please no.

…

I was munching on some light that I’d found while looking for some wormhole gravitational signatures so I could get a ride when I saw the punch-hole. Oh, some of the creatures from the other dimension were visiting again. That was fun. There had been a whole bunch of punch-holes a while ago, way more than ever before, but then the creatures stopped visiting.

Most of the others said good riddance but I thought it was too bad. The creatures were way more interesting than anything that lived here, and I wished they’d visit mor often. I only ever looked from afar since the creatures were more fragile than grav-light sculptures, but even then, there was so much about them unlike anything we had here.

I kept munching on my light (It was good, full spectrum stuff) while I watched. The creatures’ little shell-object weave around the big time-clouds and space-pillars. The shells were getting better at that—the first few I watched up close bashed themselves up a bit.

I was slurping up the last of my light when I noticed □̴̝̓͠□̵̘͎̒□̶̣̈́͋□̸͚̐□̶̘͉̏□̴̥͘□̶̜͌̉ had also been watching the creature-shell, and now it was getting uncomfortably close.

_Hey_ , I thought at it, _don’t do that!_ □̴̝̓͠□̵̘͎̒□̶̣̈́͋□̸͚̐□̶̘͉̏□̴̥͘□̶̜͌̉ was probably going to mess with the creatures inside. This was why the creatures didn’t visit anymore, I thought. Nobody wanted to be pranked by everyone when they arrived at a new place, and some of my □̷̩́̽□̴̲̠͙̈́̀͐□̶̡͈̐ were downright _mean_. Being the butt of a joke was never fun. (As one of the youngest, I was familiar with the concept.)

I arrived alongside the creature-shell just as □̴̝̓͠□̵̘͎̒□̶̣̈́͋□̸͚̐□̶̘͉̏□̴̥͘□̶̜͌̉ really started poking at it, and I grabbed it and flung it away. I was young, but I wasn’t weak. Quit being mean! I thought-screamed. It yelled amusement back at me and wandered away.

I examined the creature-shell. It didn’t look broken or anything, but I didn’t know if there was anything I wouldn’t be able to see. The creatures were so weird.

Well, if they’d already been bothered, it wouldn’t hurt to check on them, maybe reassure them that the pranksters didn’t represent all of us and they could visit again.

I shifted myself inside the creature-shell and started looking for the creatures. Oh, they’d put some here-stuff in the shell to make it more durable. That was clever. The creatures were all boxed up in the two extra-durable boxes. I found five in one box, but they were all just sitting around and not moving. They were nervous but not upset, so they must not have noticed when □̴̝̓͠□̵̘͎̒□̶̣̈́͋□̸͚̐□̶̘͉̏□̴̥͘□̶̜͌̉ bothered them.

Then I found three more in another durable-box, and they had _definitely_ noticed that they were being messed with. One of them was very freaked out, and I recoiled a bit since its emotions tasted _bad_ , but then I went back again because no wonder they didn’t want to visit if they kept feeling like that and nobody was nice to them.

The creature was freaking out over another…creature? It felt like a creature, but it wasn’t like the other creatures—it was living in the creature-shell instead of in one of the creature-bodies. And oh, no, I could see why the one creature was freaking out. Whatever □̴̝̓͠□̵̘͎̒□̶̣̈́͋□̸͚̐□̶̘͉̏□̴̥͘□̶̜͌̉ had done made this last creature very confused and parts of it were blinking in and out of existence. They’d come back eventually, but the other creature might not know that.

Before I really thought about it, I slid into the creature-shell alongside the last creature and tried to soothe it. The blinky parts would come back faster if it calmed down. But the grabbed onto me and I wasn’t able to stop it before it melded into myself.

Oops.

…

Seth starred at the diagnostics. Whole sections of the bot pilot’s code were rapidly strobing in and out of existence. The ship had lost nav, there was no knowing where they were—or rather, where they would come out if the bot pilot managed to recover enough to punch back out of the warp-jump before the intentional incursion got into all their heads. At this point that was pretty unlikely.

He didn’t even know if the systems were intact enough for a self-destruct. They’d have been better off letting the corporates shoot them to pieces.

The bot pilot vanished entirely and for a split-second Seth was sure that was it, but then it reappeared. It was still damaged—diagnostics were throwing out some strange data—but it was a stable sort of damage. Oh, thank god. He could work with that. If the nav could recalculate—

Behind him, Iris’s bright, chipper child’s voice said, “hi! Who are you?”

…

I tried to escape the creature-shell, but the creature grabbing me made me sort of…stuck. At least its blinky parts were back.

I started working on separating myself from it, but I still wanted to do what I’d come to do. The one creature was still freaking out and making bad-tasting emotions, so I reached for one of the other ones nearby. It was still like the creatures in the other box, but unlike them, it wasn’t nervous, and its emotions tasted good, so I felt good about approaching it first.

I made my thoughts as small as possible, so they’d fit inside the creature’s mind and asked, _hello?_

The creature’s emotions turned excited. _Hi,_ it thought back, _who are you?_

I was feeling great about this. As far as I knew nobody else had talked with the creatures in a nice way. I was glad they were still willing to talk.

_I’m_ _□_ _̶̛̯̱̓̎̆_ _□_ _̶̛̤̋̈́_ _□_ _̴̯̿̿̋͝_ _□_ _̷͚̅͊͜͠_ _□_ _̵̥̩̳̥͘_ _□_ _̵͓͓͚̑_ _□_ _̷̧̘͓͝_ _□_ _̵̝̭̰͉̮̍_ _□_ _̶̠̻̞͉́͠_ _□_ _̴̒̎̕_ _̃_ _̗͎̟̫_ _,_ I thought back, _I’m from here. It’s fun that you’re visiting._

_I’m Iris!_ it thought back. _Where’s ‘here?’ My dads said the only people on the_ Perihelion _were the crew and the bot pilot._

I didn’t know what those concepts meant, but then suddenly I did. Oh, the creature that fused with me knew them. It was ‘bot pilot’ and all the other creatures were ‘crew.’ That made a lot of sense because bot pilot and crew were very different sorts of creatures.

It was strange that one of the crew-creatures didn’t know that it was visiting my dimension, but I liked how the creature’s emotions tasted too much to be scared off. I explained, _‘here’ is my dimension._

Iris had a bunch of confusion over that, which didn’t taste quite as good, but there was curiosity mixed in and that was great. Better than full-spectrum light.

_What’s ‘your dimension?’ Is it part of the game my dads are playing?_

Now it was my turn to be confused. I knew the game and playing concepts, I did them with some of my □̷̩́̽□̴̲̠͙̈́̀͐□̶̡͈̐ all the time. Did the creatures visit us to play?

Iris was reviewing a memory for me, that was nice of it. I watched carefully. Iris’s ‘dads’ were telling it (in a very weird way—they didn’t seem to be thinking together at all) that they were about to play a game. Iris’s perception of time indicated the memory was ‘recent.’

A game made some sense. It would be a fun game for me if I visited the creatures’ home. The only reason I’d never done it was I was scared I’d get stuck if I followed one of the creature-shells out of the punch-holes, since they closed, and I didn’t know how to open them. I also didn’t know if there was much light and emotions in the other dimension for me to eat while I waited for a new punch-hole.

_I think so,_ I told it, _one of my_ □̷̩́̽□̴̲̠͙̈́̀͐□̶̡͈̐ _was messing with you, so I came to say hello and welcome._

_That’s nice!_ it thought, _are you going to play with us now?_

I didn’t know. I liked this ‘Iris’ and I wasn’t having much luck extricating bot pilot from myself. I didn’t want to hurt it.

_Iris? Iris honey, who are you talking to?_

…

Seth’s blood ran cold at the sound of Iris’s voice.

All he could think was _not her. Anyone else. Anyone but my daughter._

It was a horrible thought to have, but it was the truth. Everyone—everyone else had the conversation. Everyone else made the choice. They’d made a pact, the permanent members of the crew, over terrible drinks in a docking station bar when they signed on with an experimental ship. _If an intentional incursion gets into my mind, shoot me dead. I don’t want to become that._

There was a box with a loaded gun under one of the consoles for exactly that purpose.

Talking (begging, screaming) to people who weren’t there was always how it started.

Seth stumbled away from the console and fell to his knees in front of his daughter’s seat—her headphones and blindfold were still on; she couldn’t see or hear him. Oblivious, she continued happily chatting away, asking questions aloud and then pausing like she was receiving answers.

It occurred to him that it might not be part of the incursion at al—it was probably the _worst_ time for Iris to spontaneously develop an imaginary friend, but it could—

“What’s ‘your dimension?’ Is it part of the game my dads are playing?”

There was no way she’d ask that of an imaginary friend.

He had exactly one shot, he realized. He could try to lure the incursion out of her mind and into his own before damage was done. If he succeeded, he could use his window of lucidity to get the headphones off Martyn, who could get the bot pilot back online and then get them out of there.

Iris asked if the thing was going to _play_ with them.

Trying to keep his eyes from focusing on the way the incursion-effect on the bulkhead was spreading, Seth reached up and removed Iris’s headphones. He left the blindfold on. If he was successful, he didn’t want her to see what would happen next.

“Iris?” he asked, “Iris honey, who are you talking to?” Maybe leading with that meant some part of him did still hope it was an imaginary friend.

Iris pushed half her blindfold up with one tiny hand and _beamed_ at him. “It called itself—” She opened her mouth and made a garbled nonspeech sound, then furrowed her eyebrows, and then made a slightly different garbled sound.

“Can you tell it I want to talk to it myself?” he asked. He reached up and slowly tugged her blindfold back down. She’d been speaking like she was actually conversing with the incursion, if it stuck with whatever twisted game it was playing and listened to her fore just a few more seconds—

“It says you’re too scared.”

Seth blinked. _What_? “What?”

It doesn’t want to…to go into your thinking unless it has to because your feelings taste bad.”

“Can you tell it I’d still like to speak with it?”

She pushed her blindfold up again. “It says you don’t have to ask me to pass a message, it knows what you’re saying.”

He hoped that didn’t mean it was in his head without leaving Iris’s. That would be the only thing worse than the current situation, but he wasn’t hearing responses directly so that was unlikely. It was probably just reading his words out of her brain as she perceived them.

_Just_ , as if that wasn’t the next layer of an incursion. Worse, the ambient visual effect which had already been clinging to Iris (and all the other organics and computers) was intensifying, and with the blindfold pushed up he could see that it was particularly concentrated around her eyes, to the point that it was starting to look less like the ambient effect and more like the still-spreading anomaly on the bulkhead behind her.

He breathed out, he breathed in. It wanted him to be, what, calm? He could manage calm. “I’m only worried because the bot pilot had a spot of trouble,” he said, “I just want to talk to it for a moment before I get that fixed.” There was no point in scaring Iris.

“It says it’s sorry about bot pilot’s trouble. It made the one who frightened it go away,” she said earnestly. “Bot pilot is okay now, but it’s stuck.”

Seth glanced at the interface. Nav was still throwing out errors, but the rest of the bot pilot did actually seem to be okay. Two separate incursions would explain why the pilot was targeted and then abandoned to go after Iris. “Stuck how?”

“Bot pilot and—” Another garbled sound. “—got squished together.” Iris grabbed one of her hands with the other to illustrate. “It can’t leave without giving bot pilot more trouble.”

This was a lot more complex communication than any of the reports of mind-incursions ever talked about. Despite himself (and despite the effect still gathering around Iris’s eyes) Seth started to hope he could still get it out of her head.

“Is that why nav is still glitching?”

“What’s ‘nav?’”

Right, Iris didn’t actually know that word. Frankly he was surprised she’d known ‘dimension.’ “Navigation. How the bot pilot knows where it is and where it’s going.”

Iris bit her lip. “Maybe.” She started pulling on the straps of her seat.

“What are you—”

“Let me see,” she said, “it needs me to see.”

It needed—the incursion wanted to look at the interfaces through Iris’s eyes?

He needed to play along. If he told it no—

“Sure,” he heard himself say, unclipping Iris’s harness. He picked her up and held her against his side like this was a totally normal and safe situation and walked over to the console. Iris peered at them, the visual effect starting to bleed out of her eyes now. Inexplicably, it didn’t seem to be bothering her or obstructing her vision.

“What’s that?” she asked, unwrapping one of her hands from around his neck and pointing at the glitching navigational data.

“That’s the problem,” he said.

“Bot pilot doesn’t know where it is?”

“Or where we’re going.”

“Where are we going?” Garbled sound. “—Can help us go there.”

That, he doubted. “Home.” He didn’t see any way for the incursion to use that information against them.

Iris abruptly swung her head away from the interface and looked directly at him. “You’re not so scared anymore!”

“What—” he managed before his whole field of vision whited out for a split second.

He narrowly avoided dropping Iris, tucking her in close to his body while he recovered. When he blinked the spots away, the ambient effects of the warp had vanished, except for a few tiny sparks hovering around Iris’s eyes.

_Hello_ , he thought. Only it wasn’t him thinking it. It was just…there, in his head. The idea of the word appearing like he’d recently heard it, only he hadn’t.

_Iris’s mind-concept-box is too small. You and bot pilot have a lot more._

“Are you talking?” Iris asked, “I can’t hear anymore.”

Oh.

“We’re talking,” he told her. Mission: get the incursion out of Iris was a success. Now he just had to get Martyn—

_Mission what?_

Seth froze. Of course, it could hear his thoughts. If it learned—no, don’t think that.

It would also know if he lied to it. “I was worried about her,” he said aloud. He didn’t know how else to make sure it got those exact words. Any unintended information could be disastrous.

_Why?_

Unbidden, the reports appeared in the forefront of his mind. The dry, clinical language concealing horror stories. The ones where whole corporate crews were affected just enough to make them tear each other apart. The ones where one crew member became the intense focus of an incursion until death was a mercy. The ones where nobody was willing to perform the act of mercy, or where profit got in the way until it was too late, and the changes were enough for the affected crew member to break containment.

Shock broke him out of his spiraling thoughts. Not shock like an electric shock, shock like the emotion. It was so intense it hit almost like his white-out earlier. He was…shocked at the contents of his own memories?

_Is that really what happens when you come here?_ The thought carried more shock with it.

Seth was getting better at distinguishing his own thoughts from the incursion’s, mostly because he wasn’t in the habit of thinking in second-person.

“It is.”

For the first time that day (or ever) the genuine distress rolling through him didn’t originate with him. It was almost childlike—deeply emotional without the baggage of situational knowledge. He checked on Iris reflexively before he realized that checking on her hadn’t been _his_ impulse.

Catching his look, she jabbed a hand at his face and said, “Dad, your eyes are sparky.”

_She’s okay,_ he thought, barely noticing the absurdity of trying to comfort the thing that might be currently eating his brain. He didn’t think it was lying, or faking, that was the crazy part. Somehow, the incursion was an actual empathetic person, who hadn’t known what was happening and was hurt by the knowledge.

There was a long moment where the inside of his head was quiet, even the emotions receding, before the distress rolled through him again, this time tinged with guilt. _She is not hurt in her mind. I made my thoughts small to fit._ It was confident in that—it hadn’t known they were being really hurt, but it knew they were fragile, and it had taken precautions.

It might actually _not_ be currently eating his brain.

_You need to be not here, before the other things happen._ Seth looked at the consoles again. _Your navigation is broken. Where is ‘Home?’ I can find it._

“Home is—” Seth stopped because he could _feel_ it grab onto the thought of home in his head and _dig_ into it, pulling out information and emotion and memory.

“I don’t have the data. Only the computer has the data, that’s why I need to fix—”

_What’s data? I don’t need data; I need a mind-place._ It pulled on his thoughts again. _This is fine. I have to come with you._

“What?” He felt like he’d been saying that a lot.

_I can’t separate myself from bot pilot, and it can’t find a mind-place without me. I have to come with you._

“But you’re—” There was no way. The incursions couldn’t leave the warp dimension, that was the one safe thing about the whole mess.

_Of course, we can. You can come here. I just can’t make punch-holes on my own, but bot pilot can. Do you have light there? If I get hungry?_

“Light? Yes, of course we have—”

_I like Iris,_ it thought, _her emotions taste good. If I stay with her and get some light, that’s all I need._

“Are you trying to make a deal?”

_Deal? Yes. Deal. I want to help, but I don’t want to starve._

Seth looked at the trashed navigational data, then at Iris. It wanted him to give it permission to climb back into his daughter’s head, possibly for a long span of time. Everything—absolutely everything—told him that was a horrible idea. Everything he’d ever learned told him he should yank Martyn’s headphones off and put the gun in his hands. But then they’d still be stuck here with trash nav data, not just Iris and Martyn but the rest of the crew, not to mention the effects on however many people the intel they’d stolen could help.

“Dad?” Iris asked, tugging on his shirt, “are you still talking?”

It hadn’t hurt her.

“Deal.”

There was a brief and terrifying swoop of vertigo inside his head, and then all the consoles flickered one last time. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the incursion-effect on the bulkhead shoot tendrils through the rest of the room, spreading rapidly over the walls and ceiling. The ship’s hum changed in pitch, and then the whole deck jolted sharply sideways.

Seth stumbled and caught himself on the console with the arm not holding Iris, who squeezed his neck as tightly as her arms could manage. When he looked up, the incursion-effect was gone as if it had never been, and so were the effects around Iris’s eyes. When he looked at the console, it displayed normal space. The _Perihelion_ was on an approach vector to its regular spot in the university’s experimental dock.

_Home_. The incursion thought in his head, and then was quiet.

**Author's Note:**

> The number of times I had to stop myself from using the phrase "Iris's Irises" was SO MANY guys.
> 
> The visual vibe I'm thinking for this is somewhere between classic lovecraftian ocean gore and this [deep dreaming frog video](https://youtu.be/FEHNvuRvo7M) (watch your sound, the video screams. also watch out in general because its freaky)
> 
> The whole "FTL travel Warp dimension full of Cthulhus" I stole from Warhammer 40k, as in I stole it from my secondhand knowledge of Warhammer 40k that I've gotten from my sibling's explanations about it, so it's deeply inaccurate to the source on that count, not least of which because I stripped out the moral aspect of the "evil" warp dimension. Being an eldritch abomination in this AU does not necessarily make one evil, case in point: ART.
> 
> This was a really weird one, frankly, and I'm a little surprised it's my first finished work for this fandom, but maybe that's because I gave myself permission to stray pretty far outside of established characterization, because it's an AU set 15-20 years before canon. Cross your fingers I come up with a way to write the idea that actually started this concept, which was MB meeting this ART at the start of AC, which then got massively sidetracked into the backstory fic.


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